The Wondermark Gazette

“You look really great,” Ursula said, brushing dust from my hideous tail-coat. Paco had given me a terrific shave, but the Yam-Runners’ wardrobe collection seemed scavenged from a second-rate circus-tent pitched behind a thrift-shop at the leanest time of year, and this paisley-and-spots number was the least eye-bleeding of the lot; still, perhaps I could pass myself off at the banquet as a colour-blind eccentric, or perhaps a visiting dandy from another universe, here to learn about The Ladies.

Still, the clothes were clean and starched, and I felt recognisably human for the first time in some months. I tugged smartly at my lapels and ducked through the cave-mouth out into the night-time air. The moon hung low and fat-faced to my front; Ursula took a step up to occupy the world next to me, filling my periphery with her massive sailor’s blouse. “We’re grateful for your willingness to carry our message to the Mayor,” she went on. “Our folk can’t pass the tree-line; it’s in the Yam-Runners’ code. So it’s not often we get word down to the village.”

“Really?” I turned to see her pig-tails outlined sharply in the moon-light. “Is there some reason why you can’t go down the mountain?”

She stared at the twinkling torches of the town far below, then took a heavy step and started down the trail, her ruck-sack swinging as she walked. “It’s just the code, is all,” she said. “All we know is what we’re told, innit? So there might be a dead-vicious reason going back a thousand years, or it might just be a boogy-tale my mum made up to scare me.” I caught up to her, and she glanced over, her hair bouncing as we skittered down a steep portion of rocky slope. “Either way, this is where I leave you.”

I struggled to arrest my momentum, and shackled that wayward energy tightly to my stiff vest-coat, to draw upon later should the need arise. Ursula loomed above me, a step higher up the hill; she fished in her ruck-sack for a moment, and produced a lens of clear glass, which she handed to me. It was thin, like a monocle, and fit snugly between my cheek and brow. I set it to my eye, and the ground was suddenly aglow with a line of faint, greenish light, stretching from my feet and tracing a thin, wandering line in front of me, down towards the village.

“Quite the dapper look,” Ursula smiled. “The opticle will take you right to the town, though it’ll fade as you get near fire-light. Day-light too — it’s no use after dawn, though I doubt it’ll take you that long to get down there.”

“No, no, I doubt it,” I said, looking back up at the mountain, and marveled at an intricate web of glowing lines, the whole rock pulsing with bright green veins of paths and trails and tunnels. “You guys have a lens for everything, I guess.”

“That’s what happens when you live in a mountain,” Ursula said. “You figure out things to do with rock. Grind it into sand and tap the fire of Hades to blast it into glass. It fills the days pretty nicely.”

“Sure, sure, I can see that.” I strained on tip-toes to see if I could glimpse the ocean from here — though this wasn’t the same lens she’d shown me earlier, which had taken took the water away and revealed the flickering orange rail-lines dug beneath the sea-floor. “Say, do those trains really run under-water?”

Ursula took a step down the slope and regarded the trees beginning to dot the mountain-side, as if gauging how far towards them she dared to tread. I was curious too — were the Yam-Runners cursed? Would she burst into flame if she touched a tree? Would stuff get on my new suit, if she did? Most critically, would it be awesome to watch?

“No, and I don’t think so, and probably, and probably,” she murmured without looking at me, and I realised with a blush that I had voiced my questions aloud. She grinned, though, and shrugged. “Just always figured, why take the chance. As for the trains, they run in the old crust-worm tunnels; my grandfather laid the first tracks from this island — met a Scotsman mid-way and never looked back, if you know what I mean. From then, our fortunes were locked to the global yam-market. Now the trains run just after sunset and just after dawn — tonight’s will hit Dublin, then London, Calais by noon, and Gibraltar by sundown tomorrow. It should be leaving pretty soon now — you’ll be able to hear it, if you know what to listen for.”

Dublin. Then London. Calais by noon. Gibraltar by sundown. Any of those places would give me a new start, a new opportunity to build my fortune, a new freedom from, well, everything. “Can a person just — ride the train?” I asked.

“Oh, sure, if you’ve got a load of yams, you just get right on. Good way to travel, down in the earth — you’ll sweat off ten pounds on the ride, but on the plus side you’ll never go hungry.” Her eyes seemed to narrow in the moon-light. “But that’s idle curiosity speaking, right? Mere wondering at the ingenuity of modern industry, and all that? You’re not — thinking of –”

In my coat-pocket I felt the folded and wax-sealed parchment that she’d pressed into my hands just minutes ago, deep within the mountain. An important message from the Yam-Runners to the Mayor, she’d said. And a chance for me to see Rikah again, I’d added silently to myself. Hah! Good luck, she’s the Mayor’s son’s girl, and he’s a bruiser, Ursula had rejoindered, as I’d apparently said that bit aloud as well.

But a chance to leave it all behind had suddenly presented itself, and I wasn’t sure if I shouldn’t take it: the dream of Grenadon’s cave still shook me. I might be throwing my life away on a fool’s errand, chasing a hope that I just couldn’t admit had died a long time ago. I should make a clean breast of it, I thought, and then No! Stop thinking about Rikah!

“Forget about her,” Ursula said. “Just deliver the message. At this rate, if you do talk to her, you’ll end up thinking something untoward, accidentally saying it out loud (like you just did again), and then having the Mayor’s son’s fist full in your face before you can blink hopscotch.”

A low, haunting whisper suddenly vibrated my bones, and I felt my ear-drums crackle. Ursula canted her head towards the mountain-top. “Aaaand there’s tonight’s train,” she said. “So it’s too late for you, anyhow.”

A wave of heat rolled along the ground and wrapped around my feet. The greenish lines in my opticle turned a searing shade of yellow. A light flickered in the night sky, and far off at the top of the mountain, a burning red plume of smoke pulled itself thickly into the atmosphere in clumps.

“That’s the Cave,” I said. “That’s what I saw from the air-ship.”

“Exhaust vent for the trains,” Ursula shrugged, and turned back towards the village. “You’d better get a move on; that Banquet’s already started, I’ll wager, and you’ve got a stiff walk ahead of you.”

I stared at the dissipating cloud of red-orange smoke, wondering at the sight that had been so remarkable from a slightly different angle. “Exhaust vent,” I murmured. “So, then, I wonder, what would be the place that Grenadon told me to look for?”

Ursula narrowed her eyes. “What did he tell you?”

“I had asked him about the Tome of the Precious Lore, and he replied, ‘There is a path along a lonesome cliff,’” I recited from memory. “‘I won’t direct you to it, because I’d rather it be forgotten, but if you find it, you’ll know. There, you will find your answers.’”

I don’t know what response I was expecting from Ursula, but explosive laughter probably wasn’t it. “Crazy old man,” she cackled. “Flair for the dramatic. Don’t know what he meant, but that’s as good an answer as any. Tell you what, when you come back from the Banquet, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about the Tome of the Precious Lore. All right? We’ll go up to the observatory, I’ll pull the light-jars and I’ll even show it to you in person, let you have a look at the thing.”

I stared at her. She knew! She knew where the Tome was! “Where is it?!” I croaked, suddenly hoarse, feeling my face flush with hot blood, my heart pumping fiercely in my ears. “Do you have it? Show it to me!”

I must have taken a step towards her, because she stopped me with a solid, calloused hand. My nimble cheese-twirling fingers were no match for her strong grip. “Listen,” she said. “All anybody knows is what their parents, their teachers tell them. Right? Nobody down there” — she jerked an angry finger towards the town below — “knows the real Grenadon from some dirty old crook with a stolen necklace. But things are different in the mountain. We’re not Shorelanders and cripples up here.” She shoved me, and I fell backwards onto the rock, sending gravel and dust into the air and pain shooting up my hip, scuffing my paisley trousers in the bargain. “Grenadon used to be Abner Grenadine, and he was a Yam-Runner. But when you outlive people you can start making yourself into something more, can’t you? You can get to people when they’re kids, and make yourself some sort of god to them. And when you do it that way — you never have to prove yourself. You never have to heal anyone. Not when you can make everyone in the village — in the world! — think they’re the only one who doesn’t believe.”

She was coming at me now, step after heavy step, sure-footed on the slope, and I scrambled to my feet, ducking quickly behind a stand of trees. She stopped, looking up at the gently-swaying branches, then down at me.

“Put that letter in the Mayor’s hand straightaway, and we’re square,” she growled. “You can talk to your lady-friend if you want, or find yourself a whole posse of fresh Shorelander strumpets, I don’t care — but the first thing you do when you walk through that door is you put that letter in the Mayor’s hand.”

She stared me down for a second, then turned, and through the opticle I could see that she followed the invisible green trail perfectly in the night.

And if what I thought had been Grenadon’s cave wasn’t really it at all, that meant my dream also hadn’t been real — which meant that Lara might still be alive.

“And the Tome?” I called after the retreating figure. “Will you show it to me?”

Ursula kept on walking until she disappeared into the darkness.

I watched the space where she vanished, and then with nowhere else to go, I turned back down towards the village and started my descent.

NEXT: A Dapper Gentleman

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